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As I sit in the Garden of Love with a fellow artist and female friend, we are sitting together at the colorfully decorated, recycled table and benches meeting at our weekly time on Tuesday at 2pm. This is our weekly time to practice organically healing and developmental in our creative journey of using the arts to unhinge the layers of trauma embedded in both of us. This is a time to make a new contract to unite, clear the pathway and clean the webs from our hearts and brains. We are committed to each other’s healing process and we walk into the journey together.
It is a perfect example of the alignment of the yin and yang, day and night and sun and moon.
This is not the first time I have been through this process. It started fifty years ago, the day I became a hair stylist/designer. It became an art of living in a world of women. I learned to be supportive of women because I was raised in a household of women who were in control of the power of the house, but gave their men the respect for their input. These women taught me how to love with compassionate control, shared power.
I learned to sit with women in the kitchen and the living room. I learned to value their stories, their trials in everyday life. I learned to respect their struggles and their victories. I learned the art of empathy. I learned the art of unity and creating life in the mere moments of breathing fresh coffee, bacon, and eggs smelling the house on a Sunday morning. It was an act of grace to commune together on Sunday morning, heads bowed in quiet prayer. The word sacred comes to mind when I think of those days.
So many days following I listened to women’s stories and I held their hands and wiped their tears. I helped them raise their children, as I had done as the eldest of my family. It started with my mother. I learned to be the brace that she needed to lean on. The power to heal trauma, hidden stories of pain and holding space for human beings to sit with themselves to gather time to help them to understand and respect their individual stories, find the love in between the capitals and the periods. It taught me how to be compassionate and how to be of service to myself and my community. Being of service allowed me to give back what has been given to me.
I learned to respect the role of women in society, the beauty of their ways of being. Without women there would be no sense of being loving, having a heart of healing. I have learned to respect the woman in me.
It is my pleasure and my gifting to give women love and understanding. It is my pleasure to give echoes of life to the species of humanity that carries and gives us life. My mission, my work I have developed over the years has afforded me the opportunity to nurture the ones that are nurturing.
As a man, I resented giving my life over to some other creature outside of myself. I resented unconditional love because it called me to be present for another for the higher good of all. I learned to step into the circle of love of being, giving and receiving love. Kindness became a way of life, a life I have come to value.
So as we, my friend and I, sit in the garden of love and I am listening to her story of finding herself and learning to honor and respect herself. I am organically working with her, holding her hand and soothing her mind. She is bruised, but not broken. I want to fill her faults with hot gold, so she may become more precious with the mending of her life process. I get the opportunity to listen to her story to understand the paragraphs and lines that make another chapter in her book of life. In the process, I am learning how to honor myself, my time and my wisdom I have gathered over fifty years. What a gift to know my life has value, while I honor the value of her life and journey.
I am bruised, but I am not broken down. I have been broken open to be as fresh as the morning. I get to celebrate my time of being born again, as my authentic self. My bruises are healing as I assist another in their process of healing.
I have learned to honor the healing journey and not to try to press or push the process forward. Just allow it to unfold and manifest as itself, as a living lesson. I have learned to know I am not saving these women. I am loving in my assistance to support them as valuable human. I have learned to be conscious of my part of the human story and how to stay busy working in my particular lane.
I come from a family of teachers, healers of the human spirit. It took me time to respect and step in fully to my gifting which is in the alignment of my family and our ancestors. We are all love warriors with feet and heart grounded in the soil of the earth. We are walking trees of the forest and the leaves that feed the lungs of the spirit. I live to teach and I teach to live.
Now I know the years of being raised in the womb of women’s story, nurture in sacred conversations in kitchens, living rooms, hair salons and now gardens of love where I nurture and attempt to hold space to support the mending of the internal war of the heart and mind.
After being raised in a woman’s world, I have to go out into the world and develop my sense of manhood, outside of the man box. I have always like the fact I was a rule breaker, an artist practicing an art of living that calls for alignment and healing of union of heart and mind, divine feminine and the divine masculine. There is no such thing as war until we declare it in a moment of fear.
Dropping the rock of fear allows us to find peace within. Sitting in the Garden of Love, speaking in notes of loving to my female friend, reminds me I am a love warrior cutting through hate, fear, and trauma. We have come here to be love and the healing of the internal dialogue and the emotions allows us to become more present to be in the flow of life. I am sitting in the lap of love and I am loving it. I am loving my other half on this planet and that other half is the species of women. In unity, there is nothing that can stop us as united people. It starts with meeting in the Garden of Love, every Tuesday at 2pm.
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